State looks for ways to boost organ donor rolls

KNOXVILLE — About every six minutes on a recent Friday, the “ding” of a bell followed by a round of applause commemorated people making promises they hoped they wouldn’t have to keep anytime soon.

It signified that someone getting or renewing a driver’s license at the Drivers Service Center in Strawberry Plains had registered to be an organ and tissue donor.

The drivers’ center is one of six in the state piloting the “Bells for Life” program to raise awareness of the Donate Life registry and encourage people to sign up.

It seems like a small gesture — but the outcome makes a big difference, said Billy Jarvis, senior public relations coordinator for Tennessee Donor Services, which handles organ donation services in this area.

While more than half of Americans are registered to be organ donors on their driver’s licenses, fewer than 40 percent of Tennesseans are. Jarvis said metropolitan areas like Knoxville, Nashville and Memphis are closer to 50 percent than the rural counties around them.

But the gap makes a big difference: Around 3,000 Tennesseans are on the national waiting list for

organs — most of them kidneys.

So, if ringing bells will help lower that number, Jarvis is more than willing to bring bells to the driver’s center — again and again. The center has worn out multiple sets of bells since the program began in July, he said.

“People like the recognition — it seems to be popular, especially, with the younger people,” said branch manager Ron Scarbro, who, like his staff, has “Donate Life” embroidered on his state uniform shirt. “And it’s generated a lot of interest. People ask questions.”

It’s unclear yet whether it’s resulted in an increase in donors.

Teenager Courtney Coffy of Knoxville, at Strawberry Plains to get her first-ever driver’s license, said she liked the bell — but she would have been an organ donor anyway, because her parents are, she said.

“It would be great to save a life,” she said.

And Ron Boldt, who recently moved to Tennessee from California, thought the bell was “cool” but said he’s been registered since 1997.

“You can save lives, for sure,” he said. “There’s a waiting list for these things.”

Of Tennesseans who register as organ donors, 98 percent of them do so on their driver’s license. That’s a legally binding contract in the event of death, even if the family objects, Jarvis said — although most don’t. He still suggests talking to one’s family so they won’t be “taken aback” if it comes up later.

All the hospitals in TDS’s service area call the donor organization if someone dies at the hospital who could potentially be an organ donor, and a team comes to talk to their families, Jarvis said. Years ago, about half of families agreed on organ donation, he said; now it’s more than 75 percent.

TDS now is involved in 300 to 400 transplant cases a year, up from around 100 cases 15 years ago. But the demand for organs also has increased, Jarvis noted, with medical advances and regulations increasing the number of people who are candidates for transplants.

The rising number of drug overdose deaths has also increased the number of available organs, Jarvis said: “They’re what you call ‘high-risk donors,’ but their organs usually are very good [because] they’re young.”

IV drug users are more likely to have Hepatitis C, which once would have excluded them from donation, Jarvis said, but the demand for livers and kidneys, especially, is so great that some transplant centers will now transplant organs from a hepatitis C-positive donor to a hepatitis C-positive recipient.

“It’s always been a ruleout for us,” Jarvis said, “but we’ll see” how that changes.

Beyond bells, which soon may become standard in all Tennessee drivers’ centers, Jarvis thinks the increased survival rate of organ transplant recipients — some living 30 or 40 years past transplant — is likely the best way to grow the donor registry.

“It really gives the donor family something good out of something tragic, and a lot of our donor families go on to volunteer with us, or they meet the recipient,” Jarvis said. “There’s nothing better than seeing someone who’s had a heart transplant still alive 30 years later.”